Email is a huge part of any marketing strategy. From product announcements and recommendations to special offers and customer engagement, retailers are successfully engaging email to drive sales. And when it comes to purchases made as a result of receiving a marketing message, email has the highest conversion rate (66%) when compared with other methods such as social media and direct mail.
The introduction of user-friendly ecommerce technology with wide-ranging automation options means that businesses can target customers and prospects at just the right moment. According to DMA, automation is a huge asset in the push for conversion too: Over 75% of email revenue is generated by campaigns triggered using automation, segmentation and other data-analytics tools as opposed to blanket mail-outs which account for only 21%.
So what is the best way to build your email marketing and how can you gain customer enthusiasm, trust and basket value through email?
Personalise Using Segmentation
Statistics show that emails with a personalised subject line are 26% more likely to be opened and that personalised emails deliver six times the transaction rates of general messages. Yet only 39% of online retailers send personalised product recommendations in their email campaigns. Meanwhile, the world of online retail has conditioned customers to expect a highly personalised, recommendation-based shopping experience.
An ecommerce, marketing and customer-centric analytics platform like Rezcomm enables you to separate customers into groups for targeted, relevant marketing.
Targeting options include:
- Customer profile characteristics/demographics – the traditional segmentation based on age, gender and location
- Customer value – current and predicted – a great way to build customer loyalty groups favouring your best customers
- Customer lifecycle groups – looking at how to help the customer progress from a one-time purchase to regular brand loyalty
- Customer behaviour in response and purchase – how quick a person is to respond to a marketing communication by converting to spend
- Channel preference – build up a profile of whether a customer responds better to email communication or post/phone contact
- Customer personas – a method by which you create fictional/idealised customers with the primary characteristics of a group of users, and use this persona to communicate certain lifestyle wants and needs across the company, leading to a better customer experience. These ‘example’ customers help marketers to better understand the people they are targeting, creating a better customer experience
Exploit these segmentation options to deliver highly personal messages to your customers.
Rezcomm puts everything you need within easy reach. Our world-first CRM, BI, Analytics and Marketing solutions synchronise all your airport’s data for crucial customer analysis and help you target passengers with personalised campaigns, selling what they need and suggesting products and services that link with their regular travel habits.
Write a Killer Subject Line
Your email heading is an introduction, a snap impression of the content and purpose of the message. It’s the first thing the subscriber sees, and can so easily be the difference between the choice to open your email or swipe to delete it. A subject line should be short, informative, warm and friendly. Use humour, but keep it professional and within the conversational style of your brand identity.
Types of Email
Recommendations
Again, segmentation is invaluable in deciding how to address each customer. Personalised emails are perfect for existing customers, and for a shopper who has already bought a product the subject line can communicate an up-sell or cross-sell that will improve their overall experience. Try, “You Might Also Love,” “We’ve Got Something For You!” or “A Special Treat for You Today.”
Re-engagement
Returning customers can be greeted with a “Welcome back,” message, which builds relationships with a sense of familiarity, or an email can ask a question. Personalised subject lines can be used in mass emails, focusing on birthdays, previous purchases and experiences or offering loyalty rewards.
Welcome and onboarding
New customers and prospects, such as those who have given their data via Wi-Fi sign-up or webpage, can be immediately engaged with a confirmation message, ensuring that the customer is interested in receiving emails. This not only complies with data protection law, it means marketing data remains clean, optimising the marketing budget. Once the email address is confirmed, a welcome email can be used to let the new customer know of products, services and offers, encouraging them to make a first purchase. The subject heading should be engaging and exciting, and personalisation can be introduced right from the start.
Remember, while a significant proportion of companies have a high focus on customer acquisition rather than retention, it costs five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Make sure your email marketing rewards loyalty and maintains the interest of your current clientele.
Feedback requests
Customer feedback is an extremely direct and valuable way of identifying areas where you can improve. It’s also a good opportunity to look at why each customer signed up for your mailing list, and what they expect from your marketing emails. Motivation ranges from wanting to stay up to date with news and products (72%) to hoping to receive discounts and special offers (14.8%). You might consider an incentivised feedback campaign where you ask your customers what inspired them to subscribe.
Event Triggered Mailings
Automated emails can be set up to trigger when a particular event occurs. Communications can be created to offer:
- A welcome for a new subscriber or lead to your email list
- A welcome for new a customer (onboarding)
- Reactivation for customers or subscribers who have lost engagement
- A follow up for a shopper who abandons their cart mid-purchase
- A follow-up for a shopper who browses or searches on your site but leaves without making a purchase
- Emails suggesting repurchase or replenishment of regular disposable products
These kinds of automated communications are a low-cost way of boosting response. Once set up and tested they can work away in the background, maintaining and building customer relationships.
It is, however, important to regularly refresh and update these messages, and to use dynamic content to keep them relevant. Highly engaged customers will soon start to notice emails that always look the same.
Get Your Timing Right
It’s widely understood that there are clear optimum times for open and click-through rates for email campaigns. By sending marketing emails such as newsletters during readers’ top engagement times it is natural that your average open rates and click-through rates will increase.
As partner to airports worldwide, Rezcomm holds data from a quarter of a billion passengers, and this includes up-to-date analysis of region-specific optimum engagement times for the industry.
Read our blog The Best Time to Send Emails (Based on Industry Study Results) for more information.
Remember to consider time zone differences, subscribers’ daily routines and other best practices for email marketing when timing a campaign.
Create Visually Effective Emails
Your emails should stand out from the numerous other permission-based emails in your customer’s inbox. They should be mobile friendly, to accommodate the huge number of people who read their emails on a mobile device, and they should have clear call-to-action messages and buttons.
Average email open time is only 15-20 seconds, and in that short window of time you need to create awareness, interest, desire and action (AIDA). Experiment with layout and colour and use your CRM system to analyse the results of different campaigns.
Embrace omnichannel
Today’s customers are rarely limited to one device. According to Campaign Monitor, 60% of online adults in the US and UK use at least two devices every day. In fact, mobile has become central to digital experience. Between 2010 and 2015, mobile email opens increased by 30%, and this number continues to grow. This is only part of the picture in which 40% of Internet users switch device to complete a purchase or other online activity.
We’ve already talked about visually effective emails, and specified that these must accommodate mobile, but the huge number of different devices, email clients, apps and browsers has the potential to create an almost impossible constant moving of the goal posts. It simply isn’t cost effective to either just assume your email looks good across all these platforms or to try to address the issue using design, code, and testing.
Email with a mobile-ready design is essential, freeing up marketers to focus on content, personalisation and optimisation. This means mobile-ready templates that will automatically optimise for desktop and mobile views.
Rezcomm’s email marketing tools include brand-matched, mobile ready, user-friendly email templates that make your emails look just as good whether your customer opens them on an iPhone, in Gmail, on an android phone or on any of the other hundreds of devices or platforms available.
Make the most of analytics
Campaign Monitor reports that 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last 12 months. As data capture becomes more sophisticated, there really is an absolute wealth of information available. When this data is properly harnessed it provides the opportunity to really know your customers and drive business goals.
While almost half of all airports around the world know fewer than 5% of their passengers, leading to anonymity, missed opportunities and lost profit, Rezcomm’s systems give you tools that deliver the in-depth data your airport needs. With the support of the best industry-specific technology, email marketing can become a strong, reliable revenue stream for your airport.
Rezcomm is the partner of choice for airports worldwide. The team are experts in supporting airport sales and marketing through smart, intuitive tech. If you have any questions about how you can use our integrated platform to grow revenue with email marketing, contact us for a chat.
As Director of Communications Sarah oversees project management at Rezcomm and works with clients to deliver their ecommerce projects efficiently, on time and on budget.
